I think I’m not. I’ve really never known what category I fit into, it never seemed important and it still doesn’t but sometimes rolling thoughts crash into each other and create echoes. I enjoy the hell out of poker blogger events – especially when they are in Las Vegas and I don’t have to leave hometown status to find them – but as far as feeling as if I’m part of the group, I don’t. Iggy is one of the very few that have always gone out of his way to make me feel as if I’m part of the crowd, someone special, deserving to be pimped and patted like I was a really important figure in the grand scheme of it all.

Since I started PokerWorks, and it was built around my blog, but still, the blog is incorporated now as a very small part of the site, many bloggers tend to ignore the fact that I even exist. That statement is not meant to clarify anything other than the fact that I’m not really considered a poker blogger by a lot of poker bloggers. I’m nowhere, I’m outta there, I’m nonexistent. A lot of that I did to myself, never finding time to join the weekly blogger tournaments or read other bloggers’ posts on a daily basis, I’ve let the poker blogging community slip through my fingers and disappear somewhere in the ethereal universe of the internet.

At the beginning of 07, I tried to start a blogging community on PokerWorks. It’s still a dream I have and may come to fruition some day. It didn’t go over well at all. I even opened a forum just for poker bloggers. It’s still there – on the forum – hidden if you don’t have permission to access it, but it would have been nice to have a community meeting place for all the poker bloggers and be able to share ideas. At the same time that I started that, I brought in a few bloggers to start my community, hoping they would be the foundation for a big beginning.

None of it worked out well. I was accused by some bloggers as simply trying to generate revenue for PokerWorks; according to them that was my only motive. Revenue is always great incentive but consider the fact that most bloggers write for nothing, filling their pages with interesting tales, with a few banners here and there hoping to catch someone’s eye that will sign up and give them a penny or two for their time. How is what I am doing any different than what they are doing? And I had hoped to begin a revenue share program with any and all bloggers that entered the PokerWorks blogging community. Well, not to worry, the UIGEA and a programming error took all my hopes and blew them to hell.

While I have had experiences that none of the poker bloggers of the world will ever have – dealing and playing the game for almost thirty years – I still am really not a poker blogger. I consider myself to be a thinker, a philosopher, a writer, a person of many talents that boil down to a batch of trivial knowledge that doesn’t mean jack shit in the real world, a granny, a mom, a great friend, a basket case of endless twisted thoughts at times, a solid and defined rock of disciplines, and a real time loon.

So while all the blogger thoughts were storming through my skull, I managed to find an old memory of dealing my first big tournament. I literally had to bust out laughing when I ran the sequence through my head. That tournament was the last of the Grand Prix Tournaments held at the Golden Nugget. I had never – NEVER – in my life had people treat me the way the players and mass of humanity milling in and out of the casino dished out their arrogance and disdain at me BECAUSE I WAS A DEALER! It just blew my mind. I was scared to death and hated every second of that dealing gig. But this little jewel came back to fill me with laughter at my own ignorance in the art of dealing high limit.

I dealt a $200-400 7 Card Stud 8 or Better game. It was a screaming jammer. Chips were flying, players were counting out stacks of $100 bills and throwing them at the pot, and at the end of one hand, with somewhere around $20K in the pot, the pot was split between a high and low.

I was stacking up the chips and one of the players in the hand demanded that I give them the $100 bills to chop as I split the chips. I kind of balked; thinking players should NOT have their hands on any of the pot, and got scolded by several other players. Nuff said. I handed over the bills and went on to stacking and dividing.

The following night, as Murphy’s Law would have it, I was back – dealing that same game/limit with most of the same players. I had another huge pot that ended up being chopped with a high and a low. Thinking I was too smart, I picked up all of the bills (before I started stacking chips) and tossed them to the 4s with, “Split this up!”

The 4s looked at me, never touching the bills, and said, “The players involved in the pot are the ones that chop up the bills.”

I was so embarrassed. Kee-rist! That was the beginning of an education of a lifetime.

So poker blogger I ain’t. But real person I am.